92 



Industrial and Material Progress 



aud laughing, as boys aad girls, young men and maidens have always 

 done, and will always do, to the end of the world. 



Have you any curiosity to step inside one of these houses, and see 

 how your ancestors lived ? Of all the sights I saw in Europe, by far 

 the most interesting to me was the ruins of Pompeii, where, after an 

 interval of 1800 years, we can still see the very rooms where the people 

 lived, the beds where they slept, the kitchens and ovens where their food 

 was cooked, and the very footprints which they left on the pavement. 

 And of all the museums I saw, not one compared in interest with that 

 at Xaples, where tlie furniture and implements and ornaments col- 

 lected from these houses were open for our inspection. 



To know how people were housed and clad, how they ate and slept, 

 to learn their home life, their amusements and occupations, is of far 

 greater interest and of greater value than a knowledge of their legis- 

 lation, their politics or their wars. The poverty of details in all 

 cotemporary records on such subjects is always to be regretted, so 

 that even the crumbs of information which fall from the letters and 

 diaries of the time are to be thankfully gathered up aud set before you 

 as the best that we can do. 



Thanks to Mrs. Grant of Laggan, we know pretty well the arrange- 

 ments and contents of an Albany house a century ago. She spent some 

 years in Albany, when a child, about 1765, aud by her talent and 

 vivacity attracted the attention of Madame Schuyler, whose memoirs 

 she afterward wrote. Let us then enter, and although the hundred 

 years that have elapsed may have dimmed and dismantled somewhat 

 the old house, we shall still find that which will interest us. 



A great mansion of that time was always set with, its broadside to the 

 street, and the entrance was at the middle. Through a door that was 

 divided into two, an upper and a lower, you entered a hall ten or twelve 

 feet wide, and even wider, which ran through the house. There were 

 chairs and scf les placed here, and on account of the breeze which gen- 

 erally could be felt, it was a favorite resort in the hot days of summer. 

 At the rear end of ihe hall, a staircase with a landing carried you to 

 the second story. On this landing stood the old Dutch clock, although 

 by this time they were more often made in England than Holland. 

 On one side of the hall was the parlor, a large square room, with 

 plenty of light let in through the narrow panes of glass with which 

 fashion is making us again familiar. A great fire-place occupied one 

 side of the room, with its brass andirons and fender, beside which stood 

 the sho\el and tongs, and bellows. Some stiff, straight-backed chairs; 

 sofas without springs, but comfortably cushioned: queer crooked- 



